Greenore Point Lighthouse, Shore Road, Greenore, Co. Louth

That combination, a working structure stripped of its one working part yet otherwise whole, is what makes this small tower south of Greenore Point worth a second look. It is not a ruin. The walls are painted ashlar stone, the sash windows are still timber and eight-over-eight paned, and the domed light at the top still has its walkway and wrought-iron railing, as though the keeper had simply stepped out and never come back.

The tower was built in 1830 by George Halpin Senior, the engineer responsible for a great many of Ireland's lighthouses during that period, and it belongs to a moment when Greenore was being shaped by shipping rather than by the quiet fishing and farming that surrounds it now. The lighthouse and its keeper's house, standing together to the north-east within a shared plot enclosed by a rubble stone wall, formed a working pair: one building for the light, one for the person who tended it. Inside the tower, a granite and concrete floor and smoothly rendered walls lead up a circular granite staircase, its ironwork and fluted columns surviving even though the light itself has been disused for some time. The two-stage tapered form, corbelled brackets carrying the flat roof, and the projecting plinth at its base are all original, giving the structure a completeness that is unusual for a decommissioned aid to navigation of this age.

Approached from the east, the grounds are marked by square gate piers with pyramidal caps and a granite-coped wall, a modest but deliberate boundary between the lighthouse complex and the open point beyond. There is no working light to see, and no public access implied by its current state, but the exterior alone rewards a slow look: the weather vane above the lantern, the painted stonework against the sky, the sense of a functional maritime building that has kept its character even after its function ended.